Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Because of what they've encoded in the Private Use Area block at code point U+E0F2. Check STIXv1.0.0/Glyphs/STIXNonUnit.otf.pdf in the zip file to see it, and check the last link in the summary for the character's name. I hope that gets folded back into the Unicode Standard someday....

The biggest problem with 'modern' fonts I can see is that so few have proper differentiation between O and 0. It's an ugly thing, particularly when it's a problem we solved decades ago and should have stayed solved. Yet somehow it doesnt.

Is downloading this package going to help with that problem? MathML is nice but I dont actually need it. 0s that actually look like 0s would make me very happy though.

Are you honestly telling us that you can't tell the difference between a round character and a squished one? That's just sad.

The practice of putting a line through the zero was more relevant back in the days when we had keypunch ops transcribing code or data from sheets of paper to punch-cards or mag tape. Not all of us had the luxury of the exclusive use of a CRT terminal. Back then, all the machines I worked with had no facility to accept or reproduce lower-case text (this was regarded as an unnecessar

Using a zero for an empty set is perfectly understandable, both may be voiced as 'null.' It is difficult to think of a situation where one usage of it would be confused with another - i.e. where context would not make it clear and obvious which is meant. Also there are other ways to symbolise a null set, {} coming to mind immediately.

Slashed zeros look nothing like a theta. The only thing other alphanumeric character they resemble is the letter Ø used in Norwegian and Danish. The chances for confusion

Lots of fonts have that problem. Some also have the problem where l (lowercase L), I (uppercase i), and/or 1 (the numeral) look pretty much the same. But those are kind of common problems that can be fixed and have been addressed in many fonts. It doesn't seem like this package is aimed at that, but rather aimed at providing special notation for math/science/engineering publishing.

Just use Bitstream Vera Sans Mono [wikipedia.org]. To quote Wikipedia, "The Bitstream Vera Sans Mono typeface in particular is suitable for technical work, as it clearly distinguishes 'l' from '1' and 'I', and '0' from 'O', unlike the more widely available Monotype Courier New."

Uh-oh. Nobody told those publishers that the SIL license was not written by a lawyer and never had any legal review. OSI, unfortunately, will approve a license that hasn't been crafted by a lawyer, and this can be a big problem for the users of that license, when the license acts radically differently in court than they expect it to.

The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!

The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!

I thought that was a feature.

Fonts are very funny in that they're a form of art that is meant to be used by people to create more art. It starts off as the typographer's amazing work of art... but once it's on the page, it's no longer just the typographer's work of art: it's part of another work of art. And no one pays attention to the poor typographer after that point... apart of typography geeks, of course.

Aside of the fact that you can recover the original font data easily through embedding and you don't

I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable (although font programs are) and that fonts can be traced without infringement. It is easy for the font to leave the control of the copyright holder, although perhaps without any hinting that is embedded in the font.

But in this case, the entire intent of the SIL license is that the fonts do not appear in one of those "10,000 Fonts!" packages sold by folks who only aggregate them and do none of the work. And that intent will be thwarted.

The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!

I find your interpretation of the license quite strange (but, well, I am not a lawyer). The license only says that the license "does not apply to any document created using

The license only says that the license "does not apply to any document created using the Font Software", not that the license does not apply *at all* once the font is embedded.

A little clarification, it's not the license that does not apply to documents created with the font, but the requirement that the font can only be distributed under the same license. Here is the precise text about this exception:

5) The Font Software, modified or unmodified, in part or in whole, must be distributed
entirely under th

The problem is simply that they didn't know the right words. They could have given permission to distribute a document without restriction when the fonts are embedded in it, and everything would have been OK. But they didn't give that permission, they said, and I quote: The requirement for fonts to
remain under this license does not apply to any document created
using the Font Software. They didn't consider that if the font is no longer under the license, none of the license terms apply any longer. They d

Thank you, I now understand where the problem is. Still, I'm not so sure this would be so easy to fix.

They could have given permission to distribute a document without restriction when the fonts are embedded in it, and everything would have been OK.

What if I want to distribute a document containing the embedded fonts while imposing some restrictions on the document itself? Would I be able to do that if you only give me permissions to distribute the document without restriction? But maybe I'm mixing up wit

That's a good question, and the answer would be that the attorney crafting the license would take more time thinking about it than I take to write the typical shashdot comment:-) Making this license work correctly would be within the competence of any lawyer.

Essentially all of my consulting work these days is with attorneys and their customers, and is regarding Open Source in some way, and thus I am getting to see a lot of how things go wrong with Open Source and the law. And the one lesson I've learned is

I find the Inconsolata very good for diagrams and other texts that need a monospaced font.advantages:- Monospaced- has a slashed zero- The brackets are higher than the other characters. So you instinctively see what's inside the brackets.- has an open license.http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html [levien.com]

call me spoiled, but if you announce a link for a "peek", i expect something other than a website that prompts me to install the fonts i wanted a peek at.

I agree. However, if you download the font, in the archive you'll find a directory "Glyphs" that has a bunch of PDFs with tables of the characters shown. Therefore you don't actually have to install the font to take a look at it.

Interesting. I was just about to comment asking how I was able to view that page without installing any new fonts. Guess, I already have it (well, at least some version of it..). Running Firefox on Fedora 12 here.

Agreed - if nothing else, I was actually expecting images of the fonts - isn't that the most sensible approach?
Loading the page and being auto redirected to the download page is a terrible way for the submitter to give us a 'peek'.

Sorry about that - I didn't/don't know of a good image based overview of the fonts. I really wish the STIX group did have something like that, but if they do I haven't been able to find it and creating a good overview of 8000+ glyphs with images was more time than I had available.

The purpose of that page is to have SOMETHING that will let you see the font after you have it installed, since even creating an example page to show all of the glyphs is a bit of a chore.

Probably because it's intended audience already knows what it should look like, those same exact symbols they write by hand every freaking day because there isn't a decent (and free) font for them anywhere! Well, before now that is.

Yeah, sorry about that. Unfortunately, I don't know of a really good one. The middle column of this website has some images of math rendered using the Beta fonts (not final, although they are close - plain descriptive text looks a little larger in the final version): https://www.eyeasme.com/Joe/MathML/MathML_browser_test [eyeasme.com] - those are good math examples but I'm not sure they're comprehensive over the whole font (odds are not - STIX is big).

If someone has a place they can host a pdf of the glyph page as pdf that might be helpful, but unfortunately I'm not up on how to coax open source tools to generate pdfs with embedded fonts (up until now I always used LaTeX for serious math) - anybody know of a good way? Also be warned that offering up such a page for a slashdotting will be inviting a beating for a server and bandwidth - that'll most likely be a pdf with over 400 pages plus the embedded font payload.

When it comes to fonts, most people expect to see something along these lines:

Put together some representative samples of the a handful of typical glyphs and build a few images along those lines. If you want to upload a full PDF with embedded fonts, throw it on Scribd [scribd.com] or use drop.io [drop.io] and let them take the beating... they're good at it.

Despite the (simultaneously amusing and frustrating) schedule slippage that the STIX project became infamous for, they deserve tremendous praise for the work they have done here. They have created a monumental work, stuck with the project for well over a decade despite all the setbacks, and released the results free to the world as an open source font. To understand the magnitude of this task, consider how long it would take to design a good quality font for just the standard character set (which isn't easy, as witnessed by the large number of bad fontsets floating around...). Now, scale that up to 8,000+ characters. Not only that, but many of these characters are obscure to any outside of specific scientific fields, and hence the font designers won't immediately know how the characters are supposed to look - the background research must be done, the results organized into some coherent framework, and a LOT of characters have to be created more or less from scratch. This work was being funded by scientific publishing houses who wanted a font for high quality consistent output, so the goal wasn't met by "partial" success - it had to be judged a finished work before any benefit could be realized. They couldn't use the TeX approach of allowing the user to custom-roll their own solution to strange characters - everything had to be handled "up-front" and built into the font.

That is an ENORMOUS task, and the result is a VERY significant contribution to the open source world. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the people behind this who persevered and succeeded, not just technically and organizationally but also in working through the legal questions raised by the open source community when selecting an open font license. The publishing houses could have decided that "done and usable in journal paper printing" was "good enough", but the project elected to listen to and work with the community to arrive at the OFL, which is a little odd but apparently workable both for the companies involved and the open source community. So, to those who worked on this project: Thanks!

I'm very happy they pulled it through in the end! I also agree that this is a very significant contribution to open source, and we must be grateful to the people who designed these fonts. I'm also very happy that in the end they chose an OSI-approved license, which will allow this font to be part of all Linux distributions.
At the same time, it's hard not to notice not only the "schedule slippage" of 10 years or so, but also the fact that although they clearly had no clue how long this was going to take, t

Especially when it's out of their field of expertise.For example: The Mathematicians don't make fonts, that's something the Graphic Artists do
Graphic Artists don't know jack about math symbols, they leave that to the Mathematicians.
Etc, ad infinitum...

Someone finally got off their 'whatever', found out what symbols were most needed (that probably took 1 year of questions, and 13 years of arguing.) and actually put them into a font. The rest, we sure hope wasn't a waste of time.

in my userContent.css to get partial math glyphs from installed STIXfonts. To get every MathML char rendered with STIXfonts I had to disable custom fonts for webpages and set all fonts to STIXGeneral. Unfortunately STIXGeneral seems to be only available with serif. Which isn't all that good for reading text from displays.

Why can't we just make basic latex commands part of html? There are some pretty lightweight tex compilers out there which, in a perfect world, should have been shipping standard on new computers for ages now.

If what you want is to embed tex in html, you can do it: http://asciimathml.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] But that doesn't do anything about solving the font problem. You need the fonts, otherwise it can't be rendered. Knuth's Computer Modern fonts were an impressive achievement, but they date back to 1992, and the technology they're built on is obsolete and doesn't fit well with the modern operating systems, or with modern encodings such as unicode. Knuth invented scalable fonts before Adobe reimplemented and commercialized them.

I've looked at these fonts, and they look very good. Is there a LaTeX package that will let me use these fonts with LaTeX yet? I think they look much more attractive than the Computer Modern fonts that ship with LaTeX.

I'm a little surprised to find out that LaTeX support isn't going to be available until next year. I understand that the journals published by the societies funding this project use LaTeX, and that they are funding STIX for use with their publications.

And yet, LaTeX support is coming in after even Microsoft Word support (does anyone actually use Word for scientific papers?). It doesn't really make any sense.

I really like it when book or publication authors take the time to use good fonts and make the equations readable. There's nothing that turns me off more when reading a paper and the author has done all the equations in Times with crappy-looking subscripts and superscripts.

To see what it was like to use these fonts on the web, I created a test page. [animats.com] This uses dynamically downloaded fonts, which work in most current web browsers. (Firefox users need Firefox 3.6 or later.)

This sample is sized at 16 point. Smaller than that, many of the symbols are unreadable. That's something to be careful about. When you have a huge symbol set, the symbols need to be bigger. However, some of the symbols don't scale up well. If you scale up that page, the integral symbols look great, but the arrows become pixilated. Some of the symbols seem to have been were badly encoded.

This is just a raw demonstration of the font; for formulas, you'd use MathML. I'm not sure if MathML, the W3C names for math characters in HTML, and the STIX fonts are all synchronized yet. But at least you don't have to tell people "to display this page, install all these fonts first."

I tried looking at this page in FF3.6, Chrome 5, Opera 10, and IE 8. It looks like only Chrome 5 displays the appropriate font. The others look like standard windows unicode font. None of them displayed the arrows.